One moonless night the ea is black.Ships sail upon it and shine thier lights throught the double blackness of water and air.The darkness swallows up light a like a great yawning snake.On the pantai people walk,looking out to sea,but there is no sigh of ships,no sigh of drowning sailors,no sigh of anything living atau dead,only continual rushing and ebbing of water sucking and sucking at the shoreline,drawing the innocent,foolish pasangan out a little farther.They laugh unafraid,showing eachother their courage.They laugh,pointing to the water.No one can hear them.They slip off their clothes and wade in.The waves draw them out tease them,lick upward slowly abut her pale thighs,slap him playfuly,dashing a little salt sprey into his eyes.He turns to her,she to him,they can scarcely see eachother,but they are strong swimmers and they link hands as they go out alittle farther a little deeper.Now the waves swell anout them and they embrace.She is losing her footing,so she leans aginst him,allows the rise water to lift her as she pressed aginst him.He pulls her in tighly,laughing into her mouth as he kisses her.
They be seen,they cant be heard.The people on the pantai will find their clothes but they will not find the lovers.A solitary mermaid passing nearby hears thier laughter and pauses.She watches the,but even her srange pale ikan eyes can barely see them,the night is so blackso motionless.She could sing to them,as she has sung to other drowning mortals,but she is weary tonight and her jantung is heavey from too much solitude.She has not seen another of her kind for many months.She was nearly killeda few days ago,swimming near a steamship.Her head is fukk of giant engine blades,of that moment when she looked uo and saw that she a hair breath form death.That was when she turned toward shore.She is swimming with the tideeven as the pasangan r sucked out and down.Whne she drops beneth the surface of the water the mermaid can just see the womans long hair billowing out around her face.Her mouth is open wide in a siltent scream.Oh,yes,the mermaid thinks,if she could be heard it would be quite a racket.People would come running for miles.But the sea filled her mouth before the sound could get out and no one will ever hear her now.She clings to the man,and he,in his panic pushes her away.this started out as such a lark.It was a calm hot,black night and the white sand of the pantai made all the light there was.They had wandered along,stopping to ciuman and tease.laughing,so happy,so safe,and now this.She was drowning and he could not save her.Worse,worse,she would pull him under.
The mermaid rises above the crest of wave and looks back at them.She sees only one pale hand reaching up,fingers splaying and tense,as if reaching for something to hold,then the water closes over that too.
The sea is full of death,now lebih then ever.The mermaid has twice in her sort lifew,found herself swimming in a sea red with blood.Once form a ikan paus, paus sruck oleh a steamship,once from men drowning during war.Their ship had been torpedoed and most of them were bleeding when they hit the water.The sharks had done the rest.The time she had dived beneath the battle,for the niose was deafeningand the light form the explosions dazzled her so that she could scarcely see.One of the men clutched at her as she swam away,but she shook him off.She disloked being seen y men,even when they were about to die.She could amuse herself oleh sining to them when they couldnt see her,when they were wiged eyed and desperate clining to a broken spar from a perahu shattered oleh a storm,or treading water in that ridicilous way they had,with those pathetic,useless legs,then she would hide among the waves and sing to them.Sometimes it made them frantic,but few timed she had seen a strange calm overtake a drowning man,so thst he struggles became lebih mechanical,less frantic,and he simply stayed afloat as long ad he could and went under as lest quietly,without that panicked gagging and struggling that was disgusting to see.Once a man had died like that ver near her,and she had felt so courious about him that she drifted too close to him and in the last moment of his life he saw her.His eyes widened and startled with death,he knew he was beaten yet could not give up.He saw her and he reached out to her.his mouth opened as if he would speak but it was blood and not words that poured over his lips and she knew eve n as he did that he was gone.She had,by her nature,no sympathy for men but this one interest her.
It was cold,calm night and the man was so far from land that it would be days before his body was tossed up,bloated unrecongizable,on some shore.He had been sailing alone in a small boat,far out to sea,she had in fact been whatching his progress for days.The storm that had wrecked his little craft was intense,but quikly over,and he had survived it somehow,holding on to poeces if the wreckage.Then it was a few days of hopeless drifting for him.She watched from a distance,listened to him when he began to mubble to him self.Near the end he was stunned oleh her bursting into song,singing as loud as she could,though he had little strength left,a lively song that she couldnt understand.When he was dead she did something she had never done:She touched him,His skin was strange,he was already sniffening and she was fascinated oleh the feel of it.She took him oleh the shoulders and brought him down with her,down where the water was still clear and there she looked at him carefully.His eyes fascinated her os different from her own.she discovered his fingers and finger nails and toes and exammied his mouth,which she thought was incredibly ugly,and his genitals which confussed her.Graduall a feeling of revulsion over took her and she swam away form him abruptly,leaving him wegded in a tempat tidur of coral and kelp,food for the bigger ikan that might pass his way.
Now she reembers him she swims toward the pantai and her thin upper lip curls back at the thought of him.She is being driven toward lany oleh a forse stronger then her own will,and she hates that forse even as she gives in to it,just as she hated the dead man.
It is dark and the air is still.Though the sea is never still,she has illusion of calm.She swims effortlessly just beneath the surface of the waves.She is getting close to the shore,dangerously close,but she neither slows nor alters her course.
She is acuaanted with many stories that tell of perils of land,stories similar to the ones men tell about the sea,full of terror,wonder,magic and romacance.The mortals of these tales (that she can no lebih live on land then man can live in the sea)has not escaped her.She has seen land,she knows about its egdes and she has seen mountains rising above the surface of the water.Sometimes there are people on these mountains,walking aobut atau driving their cars.This coast,which she must have chosen,is flat and long.There is white sand along it for miles and behind the sand a line of green,though in the darkness its vivd warna are only black before white before gray.The mermaid can scarcely look at it.She is caought up in the surf that moves relentlessly toward land.For a while she can drop beneath the waves,but soon the water it to shallow,and when her tail and side scrape the hard sand at the botttom ahe shudders as if death had reached up suddently and touched her.The waves smash her down and roll her over.Her tail wedges into the sand and sends a awan over her,she feels the grit working under her scales.She raises her webbed hands to wipe it away.It is different form the sand in the deep water,it feels sharp and somehow lebih irritating and it smells of land.
Its useless to fight the waves.She lets body rise and fall with the surf as heavey and unreisting as a broken ship atau dead man.Soon there is nothing but sand beneath her,and the water ebbs away,leaving her helpless,exposed to the warm and alien air.The pounding she has taken has left her barely conscious.She lies on her stomach in the sand,her arm out over her head,her face turned to one side so that what little water there id can flow over it.Her long silvery body writhes in the shallows and she aghast with pain.From the waist down she is numb and she lifts her tail,rising and falling in the sand,working her deeper and deeper,aginst her will.It is horrialbe,and she is so helpless that she falls back down with a groan.Something is seeping out of her,spilling out into the sand.It is viscous at first she thinks she is bleeding,then imagies it is her life.She moans again and struggles to life herself,pushing her hands aginst the sand.She opens and closes her mouth gasping for water.Her skin is drying out it burns along her back her shoulders her neck she presses her face down as a little trickle of water rushes near her,but it is not enough and she manages only to get lebih damo sand in her mouth.She lifts her head and shoulders once lebih against the unexected wieght of air and as she does she sees a man.
He is running toward her.He left his fishing gearto the whims of sea and he is running toward her fast as he can.Her jantung sinks.He is in his element and she is at his mercy.But in the selanjutnya heartbeat she is stuck with cunning and a certainty that flashes up in her consciousness with force of memory.In the same moment she knows that her lower body is now her own,and strength surges through her like an electric current.He must not see her face she knows this.She spreads her hair out over her shoulders and hides her face in the sand.Her body is still,her strong tail les flat in the shallows,as shinny and inert as a sheet of steel.
She listens to the slap of his bare feet against the hard wet sand as he comes closer.Soon she can hear his labored breathing and his mumbled exclamations,thought his words are meaningless to her.This is a big catch but it will be a while before he understands what he has cought.In the darkness he takes her for a woman and it is not until he is bending over her that he a peculiar unwomanly shape of her lower body.For a moment he thinks she is a woman who has been left half devoured oleh an enormous fish.He looks back at the shore,as if help might come from it,but there is no help for him now..His hands pindah over her shoulders.He is detemined to pull her out of the water,not for any reasonbutthat she has washed up on the pantai and that is what men do with creatures who has wased up on pantai "My God" He says,and pitch of his voise makes the mermaid clench her jaw "are anda sill alive?"
She does not move.Hes hands are communcating all sorts of unlsess information to him:this creature is very like a woman,and though her smooth skin is extrordinary cold it is solft supple alive his fingers dig in under her arms and lift her a little.She is careful to keep her face down,hidden in the stream of her long hair,This hair he can see even in the darkness is almost white thick unnaturally long it falls heavier then he imagined and he releases her for a moment while he changes his position.He straddles her back now.She hears the suish of his feet as he steps over her head and positions himself behind her.AS he dies he takes a closer look at her long back and sees the line where the pale skin turns to silver."What are you?"he says,but he doesnt pause to find out.His hands are under her arms agine one of them strays over her breasts quickly momentarily as he lifts her.Her jantung is beating furiously now sos that she can hear nothing else.For one detik she hangs in his arms and in the selanjutnya ahe comes alive!
She brings her arms quickly under her and pushes up so suddenly and with force that the man loses his balance and falls over her.She is thanks to the sea,seveal times as srong as he is,she has no difficuly now turning over benath him.He stuggles,astounded at the sudden powful fury of the creatuere he had intended to save,but he stuggles in vain.They are entwined together in the sand,rising and falling like lovers,but the man,at least,is awear that this is not love.Her strong arms close around him and he can feel her cold clawed hands in his hair.His face is wedged against her shoulder and as he breaths in the peculiar odor of her skin,he is filled with terror.She takes handfulls of his hair and pulls his head up so that she can look at him and he at her.What he sees paralyzes him,as surely as if he had looked at meduas,though it is so dark he can see only the glitter of her cold flat lidles eyes the thin hard line of her mouth which opens and closes beneath his own.He can hear desperate sucking sound ikan make when they are pulled form sea.She rolls him under her as easily as if he were a woman and she a man.With one hand she holds his throat while with other she tears away the flimsy swimming trunks,all the protection he haf against her.Her hands loosens ar his throat and he gasps for air,groaning,pushing against her with all his strength trying to push her away.She raises herself on her arms,looking down at him coursiouly and he sees sharp ikan teeth,the dry black toungue.Her tail is powerful and sinuous,it has come up between his legs like and belut and now the sharp edge of it graes the inside of his thigh.It cuts him he can feel the blood gathering at the cuts agin and again each time a little closer to the groin.He cries out but no one hears him.The mermaid doesnt even bother to look at him as she her tail uo hard against his testicles and slices through the unresisting flesh once,twice,three times,thats all it takes.His fingers have tirn the shin on her back and he has bitten in to her breast so that she is bleeding but she cant feel anything as pain now.She drops back over him and clasps his throat between her hands.pressing hard abd for a long time until he ceases to struggle.
Then she is queit but not still.Carefully she takes up the bleeding pocket of flesh form between his legs carefully cradling in her hands she transfers it into the impression she lieft it in the sand before this struggle began.The sea will away in a menit atau two for the tidew is coming in but thats all the time she needs.She pushes the sand up and aroub this bloody treasure then exhausted and strangley peacful she rolls away into the shallows.The cool water revives her and she summons her strength to swim out past the breakers.Now she can feel the pain in her back and her breast,but she cant stop to attend to it.As soon as the water is deep enough she dives dbeneath the waves,and as she does her tail flashes sliver in the dark light air,like great metal wings,the caudal fin slices first the air then the waves.
On the pantai everythoing is still.The waves are creeping up around the man,prying him loose form the sand.Little water fingers rush in around his legs his arms his face.Already the water has washed his bloody away.Farther down the pantai his fishin gear flaots in the rising water.his tackle box has spilled its inisdes.all his lures and hooks all wiles he used to harvest the sea.bob gaily on the waves.
Now the waves harvest him!
They be seen,they cant be heard.The people on the pantai will find their clothes but they will not find the lovers.A solitary mermaid passing nearby hears thier laughter and pauses.She watches the,but even her srange pale ikan eyes can barely see them,the night is so blackso motionless.She could sing to them,as she has sung to other drowning mortals,but she is weary tonight and her jantung is heavey from too much solitude.She has not seen another of her kind for many months.She was nearly killeda few days ago,swimming near a steamship.Her head is fukk of giant engine blades,of that moment when she looked uo and saw that she a hair breath form death.That was when she turned toward shore.She is swimming with the tideeven as the pasangan r sucked out and down.Whne she drops beneth the surface of the water the mermaid can just see the womans long hair billowing out around her face.Her mouth is open wide in a siltent scream.Oh,yes,the mermaid thinks,if she could be heard it would be quite a racket.People would come running for miles.But the sea filled her mouth before the sound could get out and no one will ever hear her now.She clings to the man,and he,in his panic pushes her away.this started out as such a lark.It was a calm hot,black night and the white sand of the pantai made all the light there was.They had wandered along,stopping to ciuman and tease.laughing,so happy,so safe,and now this.She was drowning and he could not save her.Worse,worse,she would pull him under.
The mermaid rises above the crest of wave and looks back at them.She sees only one pale hand reaching up,fingers splaying and tense,as if reaching for something to hold,then the water closes over that too.
The sea is full of death,now lebih then ever.The mermaid has twice in her sort lifew,found herself swimming in a sea red with blood.Once form a ikan paus, paus sruck oleh a steamship,once from men drowning during war.Their ship had been torpedoed and most of them were bleeding when they hit the water.The sharks had done the rest.The time she had dived beneath the battle,for the niose was deafeningand the light form the explosions dazzled her so that she could scarcely see.One of the men clutched at her as she swam away,but she shook him off.She disloked being seen y men,even when they were about to die.She could amuse herself oleh sining to them when they couldnt see her,when they were wiged eyed and desperate clining to a broken spar from a perahu shattered oleh a storm,or treading water in that ridicilous way they had,with those pathetic,useless legs,then she would hide among the waves and sing to them.Sometimes it made them frantic,but few timed she had seen a strange calm overtake a drowning man,so thst he struggles became lebih mechanical,less frantic,and he simply stayed afloat as long ad he could and went under as lest quietly,without that panicked gagging and struggling that was disgusting to see.Once a man had died like that ver near her,and she had felt so courious about him that she drifted too close to him and in the last moment of his life he saw her.His eyes widened and startled with death,he knew he was beaten yet could not give up.He saw her and he reached out to her.his mouth opened as if he would speak but it was blood and not words that poured over his lips and she knew eve n as he did that he was gone.She had,by her nature,no sympathy for men but this one interest her.
It was cold,calm night and the man was so far from land that it would be days before his body was tossed up,bloated unrecongizable,on some shore.He had been sailing alone in a small boat,far out to sea,she had in fact been whatching his progress for days.The storm that had wrecked his little craft was intense,but quikly over,and he had survived it somehow,holding on to poeces if the wreckage.Then it was a few days of hopeless drifting for him.She watched from a distance,listened to him when he began to mubble to him self.Near the end he was stunned oleh her bursting into song,singing as loud as she could,though he had little strength left,a lively song that she couldnt understand.When he was dead she did something she had never done:She touched him,His skin was strange,he was already sniffening and she was fascinated oleh the feel of it.She took him oleh the shoulders and brought him down with her,down where the water was still clear and there she looked at him carefully.His eyes fascinated her os different from her own.she discovered his fingers and finger nails and toes and exammied his mouth,which she thought was incredibly ugly,and his genitals which confussed her.Graduall a feeling of revulsion over took her and she swam away form him abruptly,leaving him wegded in a tempat tidur of coral and kelp,food for the bigger ikan that might pass his way.
Now she reembers him she swims toward the pantai and her thin upper lip curls back at the thought of him.She is being driven toward lany oleh a forse stronger then her own will,and she hates that forse even as she gives in to it,just as she hated the dead man.
It is dark and the air is still.Though the sea is never still,she has illusion of calm.She swims effortlessly just beneath the surface of the waves.She is getting close to the shore,dangerously close,but she neither slows nor alters her course.
She is acuaanted with many stories that tell of perils of land,stories similar to the ones men tell about the sea,full of terror,wonder,magic and romacance.The mortals of these tales (that she can no lebih live on land then man can live in the sea)has not escaped her.She has seen land,she knows about its egdes and she has seen mountains rising above the surface of the water.Sometimes there are people on these mountains,walking aobut atau driving their cars.This coast,which she must have chosen,is flat and long.There is white sand along it for miles and behind the sand a line of green,though in the darkness its vivd warna are only black before white before gray.The mermaid can scarcely look at it.She is caought up in the surf that moves relentlessly toward land.For a while she can drop beneath the waves,but soon the water it to shallow,and when her tail and side scrape the hard sand at the botttom ahe shudders as if death had reached up suddently and touched her.The waves smash her down and roll her over.Her tail wedges into the sand and sends a awan over her,she feels the grit working under her scales.She raises her webbed hands to wipe it away.It is different form the sand in the deep water,it feels sharp and somehow lebih irritating and it smells of land.
Its useless to fight the waves.She lets body rise and fall with the surf as heavey and unreisting as a broken ship atau dead man.Soon there is nothing but sand beneath her,and the water ebbs away,leaving her helpless,exposed to the warm and alien air.The pounding she has taken has left her barely conscious.She lies on her stomach in the sand,her arm out over her head,her face turned to one side so that what little water there id can flow over it.Her long silvery body writhes in the shallows and she aghast with pain.From the waist down she is numb and she lifts her tail,rising and falling in the sand,working her deeper and deeper,aginst her will.It is horrialbe,and she is so helpless that she falls back down with a groan.Something is seeping out of her,spilling out into the sand.It is viscous at first she thinks she is bleeding,then imagies it is her life.She moans again and struggles to life herself,pushing her hands aginst the sand.She opens and closes her mouth gasping for water.Her skin is drying out it burns along her back her shoulders her neck she presses her face down as a little trickle of water rushes near her,but it is not enough and she manages only to get lebih damo sand in her mouth.She lifts her head and shoulders once lebih against the unexected wieght of air and as she does she sees a man.
He is running toward her.He left his fishing gearto the whims of sea and he is running toward her fast as he can.Her jantung sinks.He is in his element and she is at his mercy.But in the selanjutnya heartbeat she is stuck with cunning and a certainty that flashes up in her consciousness with force of memory.In the same moment she knows that her lower body is now her own,and strength surges through her like an electric current.He must not see her face she knows this.She spreads her hair out over her shoulders and hides her face in the sand.Her body is still,her strong tail les flat in the shallows,as shinny and inert as a sheet of steel.
She listens to the slap of his bare feet against the hard wet sand as he comes closer.Soon she can hear his labored breathing and his mumbled exclamations,thought his words are meaningless to her.This is a big catch but it will be a while before he understands what he has cought.In the darkness he takes her for a woman and it is not until he is bending over her that he a peculiar unwomanly shape of her lower body.For a moment he thinks she is a woman who has been left half devoured oleh an enormous fish.He looks back at the shore,as if help might come from it,but there is no help for him now..His hands pindah over her shoulders.He is detemined to pull her out of the water,not for any reasonbutthat she has washed up on the pantai and that is what men do with creatures who has wased up on pantai "My God" He says,and pitch of his voise makes the mermaid clench her jaw "are anda sill alive?"
She does not move.Hes hands are communcating all sorts of unlsess information to him:this creature is very like a woman,and though her smooth skin is extrordinary cold it is solft supple alive his fingers dig in under her arms and lift her a little.She is careful to keep her face down,hidden in the stream of her long hair,This hair he can see even in the darkness is almost white thick unnaturally long it falls heavier then he imagined and he releases her for a moment while he changes his position.He straddles her back now.She hears the suish of his feet as he steps over her head and positions himself behind her.AS he dies he takes a closer look at her long back and sees the line where the pale skin turns to silver."What are you?"he says,but he doesnt pause to find out.His hands are under her arms agine one of them strays over her breasts quickly momentarily as he lifts her.Her jantung is beating furiously now sos that she can hear nothing else.For one detik she hangs in his arms and in the selanjutnya ahe comes alive!
She brings her arms quickly under her and pushes up so suddenly and with force that the man loses his balance and falls over her.She is thanks to the sea,seveal times as srong as he is,she has no difficuly now turning over benath him.He stuggles,astounded at the sudden powful fury of the creatuere he had intended to save,but he stuggles in vain.They are entwined together in the sand,rising and falling like lovers,but the man,at least,is awear that this is not love.Her strong arms close around him and he can feel her cold clawed hands in his hair.His face is wedged against her shoulder and as he breaths in the peculiar odor of her skin,he is filled with terror.She takes handfulls of his hair and pulls his head up so that she can look at him and he at her.What he sees paralyzes him,as surely as if he had looked at meduas,though it is so dark he can see only the glitter of her cold flat lidles eyes the thin hard line of her mouth which opens and closes beneath his own.He can hear desperate sucking sound ikan make when they are pulled form sea.She rolls him under her as easily as if he were a woman and she a man.With one hand she holds his throat while with other she tears away the flimsy swimming trunks,all the protection he haf against her.Her hands loosens ar his throat and he gasps for air,groaning,pushing against her with all his strength trying to push her away.She raises herself on her arms,looking down at him coursiouly and he sees sharp ikan teeth,the dry black toungue.Her tail is powerful and sinuous,it has come up between his legs like and belut and now the sharp edge of it graes the inside of his thigh.It cuts him he can feel the blood gathering at the cuts agin and again each time a little closer to the groin.He cries out but no one hears him.The mermaid doesnt even bother to look at him as she her tail uo hard against his testicles and slices through the unresisting flesh once,twice,three times,thats all it takes.His fingers have tirn the shin on her back and he has bitten in to her breast so that she is bleeding but she cant feel anything as pain now.She drops back over him and clasps his throat between her hands.pressing hard abd for a long time until he ceases to struggle.
Then she is queit but not still.Carefully she takes up the bleeding pocket of flesh form between his legs carefully cradling in her hands she transfers it into the impression she lieft it in the sand before this struggle began.The sea will away in a menit atau two for the tidew is coming in but thats all the time she needs.She pushes the sand up and aroub this bloody treasure then exhausted and strangley peacful she rolls away into the shallows.The cool water revives her and she summons her strength to swim out past the breakers.Now she can feel the pain in her back and her breast,but she cant stop to attend to it.As soon as the water is deep enough she dives dbeneath the waves,and as she does her tail flashes sliver in the dark light air,like great metal wings,the caudal fin slices first the air then the waves.
On the pantai everythoing is still.The waves are creeping up around the man,prying him loose form the sand.Little water fingers rush in around his legs his arms his face.Already the water has washed his bloody away.Farther down the pantai his fishin gear flaots in the rising water.his tackle box has spilled its inisdes.all his lures and hooks all wiles he used to harvest the sea.bob gaily on the waves.
Now the waves harvest him!